Last year’s twin anniversaries
of Charles Darwin’s
birth in 1809 and the publication
of his On the Origin of
Species in 1859 prompted a string
of books on the life of the English
naturalist who was so concerned
about his evolutionary findings
that he delayed their publication
for twenty years. Yet there was a
woman, also raised religious, who
helped blaze the trail for Darwin
— an often forgotten and dismissed
fossil hunter who was just
as surely tortured by her own
bizarre discoveries, but who ultimately
came to accept the evolution
of life.

Born in 1799, The coast of Lyme Regis, where Mary Anning searched for fossils. Photo by Mary Emling.Mary Anning —
the dirt-poor woman said to have
inspired the tongue-twister “She
sells seashells by the seashore” —
would spend her entire life uncovering
and piecing together the fossils
of one never-before-seen monster
after another: organisms that
had been hidden away for nearly
200 million years in the cliffs up
and down England’s southern
coastline. In short, she provided raw
material to the scientists — all male
— that would be instrumental in
forming their evolutionary theories.
Stephen Jay Gould later remarked
that Anning is “probably the most
important unsung (or inadequately
sung) collecting force in the history
of paleontology” (quoted in Jo
Draper’s Mary Anning's Town:
Lyme Regis (Dorchester [UK]:
Dorset County Council, 2004). Yet
Anning’s place in history happened
quite by accident.

By birth, Anning never should
have become an influential fossil
hunter and geologist. She was marginalized
not only by her family’s
poverty but also by her sex, her
regional dialect, and her nearly
complete lack of schooling. But
she enjoyed one natural advantage:
the very good fortune of having
been born in exactly the right
place at the right time, alongside
some of the most geologically
unstable coastline in the world; it
was — and still is — a place permeated
with fossils.

After her father died in 1810,
young Mary’s family was in dire
financial straits. In order to put food
on her table, she was forced to run
the shore’s gauntlet of high tides
and landslides to hunt for curiosities
that she could sell to seafaring
tourists. If she hadn’t, her family
very well could have starved.

Her first discovery, made in
1811 when she was only 12 years
old, was of the fossil of an
ichthyosaur, a marine reptile about
four feet in length with flippers
like a dolphin and a chest like a
lizard. At first people thought it
must be a crocodile. In time,
though, the specimen attracted
massive crowds to museums in
London, where many soon realized
the skeleton was of a creature
never before seen.

Indeed, a wide range of lifeforms
had been safely deposited in
ancient sea beds up and down the
coast near Lyme Regis, Anning’s
hometown, rendering the region’s
stratigraphy uniquely able to store
(and later reveal) evidence of 200
million years of evolution.
Scientists eventually discovered
that the cliffs east and west of
Lyme Regis portrayed an almost
continuous sequence of rock formations
spanning the entire
Mesozoic Era, perhaps better than
any other locale on the planet.
Until the early 1800s, though, the
area’s residents had no knowledge
of this rich resource.

The strange fossils found along
England’s southern shoreline had
baffled the locals for as long as
anyone could remember. They
came in all forms and sizes —
including what later were determined
to be bivalves, ammonites,
belemnites, and brachiopods —
and sometimes even the fragments
of giant critters never heard of
before. Some people thought the
fossils were so lovely and delicate
that they surely must be God’s decorations,
allowed to bubble up
from the inside of the earth, a bit
like flowers were allowed to ornament
the outside. Others thought
they must be the remains of the
victims of the global flood recorded
in Genesis.

Like most everyone in England
at the time, Anning and her neighbors
had absolute faith in the fact
that species never evolved or
became extinct. Everything that
existed had always existed. Yet the
fossils that Anning uncovered as a
young woman — including many
of the world’s first ichthyosaurs,
plesiosaurs, and pterodactyls —
had never been seen by anyone,
anywhere before.

Indeed her discovery of a nearly
intact long-necked plesiosaur
(Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus) in
1823 was so incredible that even
the celebrated French anatomist
Georges Cuvier did not believe it
could be valid. It was only after
British geologist William
Conybeare defended Anning’s find
— and verified that the neck did
indeed boast at least 35 vertebrae
— did Cuvier admit he was wrong.
Eventually he pronounced
Anning’s fossil a major discovery.

As Anning aged, and began
working alongside Britain’s clique
of male geologists — most of them
Anglican clergymen — there were
countless attempts to use biblical
stories to explain the new knowledge
about the natural world that
resulted from her fossil discoveries.
For example, Anning’s friend
and associate William Buckland —
the well-known English geologist
and first professor of geology at
Oxford — believed that the fossils
found at high altitudes proved that
a great flood had once covered the
planet, just like the Flood
described in the Bible.

Anning worked alongside
Buckland for years, not only combing
the beach looking for fossils,
but also in the study of fossilized
feces known as coprology. Anning
had found many stones about four
inches long inside the skeletons of
ichthyosaurs, leading her to believe
they might be fossilized clumps of
undigested food. Soon they both
concluded the stones were feces,
which helped them figure out
what the creatures had eaten.

In her later years, she also
assisted the Swiss naturalist Louis
Agassiz during his visits to Lyme
Regis. Agassiz was best known as
the first person to propose the
scientific concept of an Ice Age in
1837. For years he strongly advocated
the prime role of glaciers in
bringing about physical changes
in earth’s crust that had formerly
been attributed to the biblical
Flood. Agassiz had worked closely
alongside Cuvier, who believed
that the earth was immensely old
and also that periodic catastrophes
had wiped out a number of
species. At the same time, a rival
French intellectual, Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck, proposed transmutation,
arguing that organisms could
transform in such a way that higher
forms could emerge from
lower ones.

Anning’s views on the flood and
the disparate theories of the male
scientists of her era are not known.
But in 1833, she was visited by a
tourist, the Reverend Henry
Rawlins, and his six–year-old son,
Frank. Rawlins believed that God
created the world within a week,
but Anning described to young
Frank how the fossils purchased by
his father had been found by her at
all different levels in the cliffs,
explaining that this meant the creatures
possibly had been created
and had lived at different times.
According to Frank’s journals, his
father refused to discuss the issue
after they left Anning’s home.

One can only imagine how
frightening it must have been for
Anning to find the fragments of
these exotic creatures — with
their bat-like wings, snake-like
necks, and big, bulging eye sockets
— and wonder if perhaps the live
versions were not about to fly out
of the sky or come up out of the
sea to terrorize her. The puzzle of
Anning’s specimens weighed on
the public’s mind as well. Many
religious leaders were convinced
that her ichthyosaur and other fossil
finds were soiling the sacred
teachings of the Bible. “Was ever
the word of God laid so deplorably
prostrate at the feet of an infant
and precocious science!”
exclaimed an exasperated evangelical
Anglican pastor named George
Bugg, author of Scriptural
Geology, written in 1826.

But according to most
accounts from her friends, Anning
continued to be a deeply meditative
woman who often could be
found praying or reading the Bible
and who almost never missed a
Sunday service. Anning’s close
friend, Anna Maria Pinney, wrote
of how the two often talked of the
idea of creation and other spiritual
topics. “To think that life shall
never have an end quite fills the
mind, but to think of God without
a beginning is more than a created
being can comprehend,”
Pinney wrote.

Anning tried to reconcile what
she was unearthing with her belief
in God’s omnipotence, a belief she
apparently held until her death
from breast cancer at the age of
47. Some of her letters to friends
suggest that she grew to accept
that there had been a progression
of living things. A few years before
she died, she remarked that —
from what she had seen of the fossil
world — there is a “connection
of analogy between the Creatures
of the former and present World.”
From most accounts, it seems she
continued to believe in God
throughout her life, but that she
also came to accept that evolution
was part of God’s plan. Toward the
end of her life, she copied into her
journals many poems and passages
laced with religious overtones.

At the Natural History Museum
in London, as well as a small museum
in Lyme Regis, Anning is recognized
as having laid the groundwork
for the theory of evolution,
not to mention nearly two centuries
of discoveries in the stillevolving
worlds of paleontology
and geology. Today thousands of
people continue to go hunting for
fossils along England’s so-called
Jurassic coast — a 95-mile stretch
of shoreline declared a Unesco
World Heritage Site in 2001. And, to
this day, real and startling discoveries
are still being made, such as the
skeleton of a 195-million–year-old
Scelidosaurus, the earliest of the
armored dinosaurs, in Anning’s
hometown of Lyme Regis a few
years ago.

With over 700 species of
dinosaurs already identified and
named, reminders of the prehistoric
past just keep on surfacing,
thrilling paleontologists. But
there are plenty of people who
are still unsettled by the signs of
the completely different world
that must have existed on earth
before humans arrived — even if
they also are able to marvel at the
possibilities.

It is most likely a feeling that —
nearly two centuries ago — Anning
would have shared.